[governance] Re: Response to Stephane Bortzmeyer on IDN

[Stephane Bortzmeyer]

On Thu, Feb 22, 2007 at 10:53:03PM -0800,
 subbiah <subbiah at i-dns.net> wrote 
 a message of 436 lines which said:

> Given the many false facts I see in the response, I will attempt to
> address the key points for the sake of the many here who may not be
> "IDN history experts" and have no time to conduct extensive personal
> history research.

Since the author of this message seems to be engaged in a race with
Jefsey Morfin on "the longest email ever written", I take the liberty
to summarize the issue a bit. Indeed, the Wikipedia page
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name#History_of_IDN
is a good start for those who want pointers to everything and who have
time. http://www.imc.org/idn/entire-arch.txt, the entire archive of
the IETF Working Group is nice, too (on-topic governance issue: that's
why everything in the governance field must be done in writing and
publicly).

For those who are in hurry, let's synthetize: IDN (the general idea,
unlike "IDNA" which is a specific solution, the only standard one, and
specified in RFC 3490) is a very old idea, probably as old as the
naming of machines. There have been many talks, many discussions, many
proposals (most of them so lacking practical details that they have
been rightfully abandoned). Many people participated. It was often
very confusing.

Only one proposal was done in a cooperative way, in an open forum,
with the intent of being a standard, the IETF IDN Working Group,
which, after many painful years, arrived in march 2003 to RFC 3490 and
its friends.

Most (all?) of the other ways were done by small companies whose
intent was not to suggest a workable and realistic way but to make
money fast by selling IDN to people gullible enough to buy them. (Not
only small companies, after all, Verisign was in it, too.) These small
companies, like i-dns.net, were very eager to file patents but much
less ready to work with other people on a common standard.

Most of the other ways were technically very different and typically
involved custom name servers, like the ones sold by the company
already mentioned.

> I think it?s clear we at Singapore University and later at the
> i-dns.net company did a very good job in publicizing IDN and in all
> its gory detail and sheperding it to a global IDNA standard. So much
> so that GNU and other public versions have come to be available
> widely by simply copying what we have detailed over and over again
> worldwide since 1998 or simply the final IDNS standard. This is not
> rocket science and anyway we repeatedly published the blueprints for
> the rocket for a decade.

I still wait for pointers to practical descriptions of IDN, before RFC
3490 and others, which can be said to have been "blueprints". I've
read many PowerPoint presentations but few IDN proponents condescended
to write actual workable plans.

PS: you forgot to file a patent for "A device to get in outer space by
the means of ejecting the result of internal combustion".
____________________________________________________________
You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
     governance at lists.cpsr.org
To be removed from the list, send any message to:
     governance-unsubscribe at lists.cpsr.org

For all list information and functions, see:
     http://lists.cpsr.org/lists/info/governance